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Sticking your tongue out at the cop who’s pulled you over — never a good idea — is likely to become even more fraught in the near future.

With federal legislation to authorize their roadside use in the offing, devices that can detect marijuana, cocaine, opiates, amphetamines and methamphetamines in saliva are almost certainly on their way to Canadian highways.

“It would be mandatory, just like you have to blow into a Breathalyzer for alcohol,” adds Comeau, a forensic scientist and CEO of the Etobicoke company.

A little larger than a physician’s tongue depressor, Comeau’s Securetec DrugWipe 5 S is one of three “oral fluid” detectors currently being evaluated by a national forensics panel for use by police forces.

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With possession laws — especially for marijuana — becoming more lax, jurisdictions across the continent are calling for tougher “drug driving” legislation to combat roadway carnage.

In Canada, this requires changes to the federal Criminal Code that would enfold roadside drug screening into existing drunk driving statutes.

And under withering pressure from the provinces to act, many expect such legislation to come before Parliament in the coming weeks or months.

If passed, the new regulations would enable provincial transportation ministries to place “spit kits” in police cruisers alongside alcohol-detecting Breathalyzers.

He notes that Canada’s drunk-driving scourge has scaled down enormously over the past decade in the face of strict licensing regulations for beginners and effective roadside enforcement.

“But at the same time . . . (young drivers have) just switched drugs, and marijuana is their No. 1 drug.”

What’s lacking on the roadway drug enforcement front, Murie continues, is an effective and simple test deterrent along the lines of the Breathalyzer. Young drivers “know the police don’t have the tools to enforce drug-impaired driving.”

Currently, police can only use roadside sobriety-testing protocols — such as having suspect drivers stand on one foot — to judge booze-less impairments,

and the courts have consistently found them untrustworthy, Murie says.

Thus, while more than 50,000 charges are still laid each year for drunk driving in Canada, fewer than 1,000 are handed out for drug impairments, he points out.

Hand-in-hand with the looming legislative framework, a panel of forensic scientists is currently evaluating commercial oral-fluid devices now used for roadside screening in Australia and several European countries.

“Our role is looking at the science behind it to see whether or not these things would work,” says D’Arcy Smith, a forensic toxicologist and chair of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science’s drugs and driving committee.

The group is currently testing Comeau’s and two other devices to determine if the readings they give are reliable.

The problem, Smith says, is that unlike alcohol, which can easily be studied in lab settings, the drugs of concern at this point are largely illegal. “And trying to get permission to do research studies on that is very, very difficult.”

Smith’s team is doing its work on volunteer subjects at two U.S. centres that host known drug-using populations, a Phoenix jail and a Jacksonville, Fla., drug clinic.

Smith, who also heads the RCMP’s forensics lab in Halifax, hopes to present his report — funded by the federal justice department and Ontario’s transportation ministry — in the spring.

But Comeau says many of the questions the Canadian scientists are probing have already been answered in countries such as Australia, which administers hundreds of thousands of roadside drug tests a year.

And any Canadian legislation would almost certainly mirror key aspects of the Australian regulations.

For example, Comeau says, legal limits for THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — will most likely be set at the 5 nanograms per micro-litre of blood used in Australia.

Such limits, which would echo the famous .08 blood alcohol content count set for drunk driving — would trigger a positive test reading as well as probable criminal charges.

And as they would with a Breathalyzer “blow over,” Canadian drivers testing positive on an oral fluid device would likely lose their licences automatically at the roadside, Comeau says.

They would also likely to face an immediate second roadside test that would take a more extensive mouth swab. Police would place this cue-tip like swab in a vile of preserving liquid and send it to a lab for a precise, court-admissible reading.

The three kits being tested by Smith’s group, all of which are already used in other jurisdictions, utilize a detection technology based on a key immune system component, Comeau says.

Immune responses to germs or other foreign bodies rely on blood-based antibodies, which attack the invaders by attaching to an antigen on the intruder’s surface.

Each set of antibodies is uniquely constructed to fit specific antigens.

The drug-reading technology, Comeau says, utilizes antibodies that have been manufactured to attach themselves to antigen-like structures on the sought drugs.

Costing about $35 each and manufactured in Germany, the Securetec tests employ a blue plastic probe, about 10 centimetres in length, with three tiny, sponge-like pads affixed to one end.

Police rub these spongy stubs three or four times over a motorist’s tongue to collect saliva.

The probe is then inserted into a small detection device

that includes a layer of antibody-impregnated paper. If enough of any drug present in the saliva sample adheres to its corresponding antibodies, the paper registers a positive test.

A positive reading is indicated by the appearance of lines in a small detector window, which is divided into segments that correspond to one of the drugs or drug groups being sought.

Costs of the testing will almost certainly be on the minds of politicians now considering them, Comeau concedes.

In addition to the $35 for the roadside test, lab costs for the secondary test will be more than $100 at a private facility.

That price can come down with volume. That has been in the case in the U.S., where laws allowing employers to drug test their workers mean there are hundreds of thousands of tests every year.

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